--- title: Why designers might care that Google is blocked in China author: George Mandis date: 2017-06-28 tags: post --- It's fairly well known fact that, as of this writing in 2017, Google is officially [blocked in China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_China). This means no Google searches, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no YouTube, etc. You know what this also means? No [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/)! I've been meaning to write about this for a year after noticing this in my trip to China and North Korea last spring. So, if you're a web designer partial to relying on Google Fonts for your projects and you're concerned with building a truly global website, you might want to take this into consideration and choose your fallback fonts more carefully. A quick tip for those that might be traveling to China: Google and its offerings are blocked in China *but* there is an interesting workaround that doesn't require setting up a VPN or anything particularly technical. If you have a U.S. SIM card for your smartphone and if your carrier offers roaming data in other countries — like T-Mobile, for example — you can still access Google, Gmail, YouTube, etc. It's a truly odd workaround that I don't fully understand, but I confirmed with someone I met in Hong Kong on that trip that this is the case. ** Wrote a blog post about consequences of blocking Google in China for designers. Reading local news — a car bomb targeting a Ukrainian colonel blew up. Yikes. **